The present work deals with the remote-monitoring and -maintenance of pumped solar thermal systems and was created in cooperation with TiSUN GmbH. Main motivation is the problem that a failure or shortfall of a solar system is often not noticed by the operator. The reason for this is the existing backup heater, which takes over the water heating mostly automatically.

To keep the effort and additional costs for remote-monitoring and maintenance within reasonable limits, the existing measurement- and control-technology of the solar system has to be used. Therefore the status quo of customary temperature-, flow-, pressure- and irradiation-sensors in solar systems is described. The solar controller is the central gateway for sensor inputs, the operating data recording and transmission of data to an external display. For remote maintenance, access to the settings of the solar controller is required.

As a practical reference, three on the market available solar controllers are examined regarding their suitability for remote-monitoring and -maintenance. It turns out that the subject can be solved very differently: from simple data acquisition and transmission with memory cards, via additional modules with web servers and network connectivity, up to the data transfer to external web server or digital picture W-LAN frames.

Furthermore the data analysis of solar systems for fault detection, control and function optimization is outlined. Not all influencing factors are recorded digitally, however it is shown that for only a few temperature profiles are enough for a rough functional description of a plant. Finally an outlook on future developments of the relatively new solutions for remote-monitoring and -maintenance of solar thermal systems is given.

Inside Job

Just watched "Inside Job" with Conny - what a great movie, my favorite part just in the end:^click

" Why should a financial engineer be payed 4 to 100 times more than a real engineer? A real engineer builds bridges, a financial engineer builds dreams. And if those dreams turn out to be nightmares, other people have to pay for it. "

To hell with those damn jobs, which do nothing for society and destroy the planet.